Save Our Safeguards

SAVE OUR SAFEGUARDS

For decades, our state had enacted landmark environmental and worker protection policies. However, when Governor Christie took office during a severe recession, the political landscape changed abruptly. The Governor discredited and shrank the role of state government, often with bipartisan support.

Threats to safeguards arise from an approach which suggests that regulation “kills jobs” and growth. Save Our Safeguards (incorporating Forward, Not Back) is a campaign to maintain sensible safeguards and promote an alternative vision that environmental and workplace protections are needed and are good for our economy.

Campaign Goals

To protect and strengthen sensible public safeguards for our health and safety in our communities.

Oppose new or resurgent threats to New Jersey’s overall regulatory process.

Maintain public support for specific safeguards, and particularly New Jersey’s programs to ensure the right to know, prevent pollution and toxic catastrophes, and to protect whistleblowers.

Responding to issuance of a final rule by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) encouraging DEP to grant waivers to corporations seeking to avoid health and environmental safeguards, environmental and labor organizations issued a joint statement.

Corporate power and influence often thwarts progress on a range of public policies. Even when there is clear preference on issues of public health, environmental protection, workers’ rights, and civil rights, good public policy gets warped by narrow corporate interests and we lose. Time and again, business and industry have aligned with the very wealthy to prevent progress on the minimum wage, earned sick time, chemical safety, environmental safeguards, and worker health initiatives, among other issues.